GREEN ENERGY HEADING TO RED STATES

 When you’re green you’re growing; when your ripe, you’re not. ~ Ray Kroc 

Unexpectedly, the winds of green energy are blowing towards red territories. It’s still in the early rounds of states racing to claim the gigantic amounts of federal funds available for greening the energy we use on a daily basis. Nevertheless, politically red states are doing unexpectedly well in the nascent green energy sweepstakes. The Rocky Mountain Institute thinks that red states will get $623 billion (B) in total clean energy investments by 2030, compared with $354B for blue states.

The misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that President Biden signed into law in last August will be providing $367,000,000,000 for loans and subsidies to upgrade or replace the nation’s energy infrastructure, improve energy technology and promote electric vehicles (EVs). Even in Washington, DC this $367 billion (B) is not chump change. The IRA is offering the largest opportunities for climate enhancement and green energy in the nation’s history. Such fiscal largesse is even changing policy makers minds in red states. Hopefully these abundant funds will not go to chumps; we’ll see.

Red states are now receiving significant federal funding for renewables. The table below shows much larger solar and wind electricity generation in Republican-controlled red states like Texas, Iowa and Oklahoma than in blue California. The sun shines nearly everywhere on our worthy planet, but where winds are constantly blowing is more circumscribed. This is due in large part because Aeolus, the Greek ruler of the winds, provides the most favorable wind conditions for producing electricity – winds steadily blowing between 10 to 50 mph – in the Great Plains states from Texas to North Dakota. This fact is illustrated by 4 of the 5 top renewable energy producing states shown in the table below are predominantly wind-driven. Texas produces 85% of its renewable electricity from wind; 3 of them – Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas produce renewable energy only from the wind. California has substantial wind farms, including the nation’s largest, but just 34% of its renewable energy comes from wind. Two-thirds of its green energy comes from solar PV panels on urban rooftops and more remote solar farms.

Top 5 Solar and Wind Electricity Producing States and their Political Control  

State & Rank	2022 Solar +Wind Generation (MWhr)	Gov-ernor Party	Legis-lature Party	Overall Control
1.Texas	136,118 (85%)*	Repub (R)	R	R
2.California	52,927    (34%)	Dem (D)	D	D
3.Iowa	46,058  (100%)	R	R	R
4.Oklahoma	37,500  (100%)	R	R	R
5.Kansas	29,536 (100%)	D	R	Mixed
Total	302,139	3-R;    2-D	4-R;   1-D	3-R; 1-D; 1-Mixed

  *Indicates percent of Total renewable energy from wind generation. Sources: DOE/EIA, Multistate chart of governors and legislatures.

Red states like Texas are ironically doing quite well generating green energy, despite their on-going solid preference for good ol’ fossil fuel produced electricity. Certifiably blue states like California have not yet overcome existing rules and regulations that can hinder swift implementation of “getting to green” policies, like constructing new transmission lines to serve newly-built, remote solar and wind facilities.

Adding to California’s green energy paradox is the California Public Utility Commission’s (CPUC’s) December ruling that drastically cut payments (up to 80%) to new rooftop solar customers who sell their excess solar energy to the grid. The CPUC mistakenly rationalized its anti-solar decision solely on equity grounds, not California’s green energy policy goals. Lower-income residential electricity customers have not participated nearly as much in rooftop solar installations as higher-income customers have. Thus, the CPUC judged that heretofore inequitable solar payments will be reduced for the latest solar customers, to diminish the inequality. By design, this decision de-incentivizes solar rooftop installations. Apparently the CPUC did not get Governor Gavin Newsom’s memo about the state’s solar-reliant energy goals.

These tribulations in California illustrate that progressive liberalism may lead to seriously-stymied construction of much-needed new facilities, whether it’s new housing, solar rooftops/farms or infrastructure. This frustration is echoed by the governor when he stated, “’People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things. People look at me all the time and ask, ‘What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s’” when we got things built? This issue is squarely allied with governor’s vexation about his new prioritizations to add evermore solar and wind farms and mandating that car dealers sell only non-fossil, non-polluting new EV or PHEV vehicles by 2035.  By then California will need at least 1.2 million EV charging stations; it currently has 73,000.

Clearly, this is an aggressive mandate. My sense is the 2035 terminal date for selling any new internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles will slip, because the state of California cannot force customers to buy zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs), many of whom inconveniently for the California Air Resources Board (CARB) won’t likely buy a new or used EV just because the state mandates and offers incentives for it.

The governor has forgotten the multiple postponements that were required for the CARB’s previous and premature ZEV mandates that CA vehicle dealers were to sell more ZEVs that represented the CARB-mandated percentage of total vehicle sales. The CARB grudgingly eliminated its 1998 and 2001 ZEV mandates, keeping only the requirement that 10% of all vehicles sold in California have zero emissions by 2003. Why the elimination? Because most vehicle buyers had other priorities than purchasing an expensive EV to satisfy the CARB. California ZEV annual new auto sales finally reached 10% 17 years later, in 2020. EVs now represent 2.7% of all registered vehicles in California.

The governor’s aggressive goals will require electricity transmission line additions to be built in a timely manner, not just new green energy facilities. Pictured below are high-voltage transmission lines that are part of the Pacific Intertie system. The Intertie has been the state’s electron throughway since 1970. It is the longest electricity transmission system in the US, crossing 850 miles from far northern Oregon to Los Angeles. During the coming years, the Pacific Intertie will be shipping more electricity, largely from renewable sources in new California locations and beyond.

 

The 500 kV Sylmar Converter Station on the Pacific Intertie

 No small contributor to this growth is Gov. Newsom’s green energy policy goal: by 2045 California will be carbon neutral and running its electricity grid, operated by the California Independent System Operator, on 100% renewable energy. This date may seem distant, but not after realizing that meeting this goal will require quadrupling quickly the amount of green electricity generation. In 2021, renewable power accounted for 34.8% of California’s electricity generation. Attaining 100% renewable power in just 22 years will not happen unless regulatory process gets modified. Such changes will be resisted and require trade-offs to be made by regulators, environmentalists and regular citizens. There’s been little public discussion, let alone agreement about how to counter this resistance and make such trade-offs to achieve policy deadlines. Its resolution will require time-consuming deep thought and administrative lingering. Furthermore, these public goals speak nothing about the various behavioral changes we Californians will need to accept in getting to 100% green energy.

Other changes that began during the Covid pandemic are continuing to wallop the SF Bay Area area’s public transit systems especially BART, the commuter rail system in the East Bay and the City. In 2020 the federal government provided almost $10B in temporary “operational relief to stabilize California’s transit agencies” as the pandemic hit. Many of these agencies, like BART, are now exhausting this extraordinary relief funding at the same time as ridership has plummeted below pre-pandemic levels. Public transit is facing an acute “fiscal cliff.”

BART’s commuting patterns and ridership have profoundly changed. Ridership has sunk to only 37% of what it was before Covid, probably the worst drop in the nation (see image below). At the same time, BART customer complaints regarding personal safety and cleanliness have dramatically risen.

 

A recent BART rush hour that’s not at all rushy. Source: NYTimes

 In the best of times BART’s passenger fares only provide 60% of the system’s costs. It’s currently nowhere near the best of times. The system’s public subsidy has been estimated to be over $6 per person-trip before ridership collapsed. California will likely provide a needed $1.1B bailout for customer-poor, fiscally-decrepit BART, only about half of what it requested. BART has already begun increasing fares and fees for its riders. Also likely are new requests for higher Bay Area sales taxes aimed at avoiding transit’s fiscal cliff. Train and bus services will surely be reduced to save costs. Such cliff-avoidance procedures in turn will further diminish transit ridership.

Prohibiting ICE sales by 2035, achieving carbon neutrality by 2045 as well as returning BART and other transit agencies to stable, long-term existence ASAP seem positively utopian to me. Mind you, I have nothing against utopias, beginning with Thomas More’s that I read in high school. But as literary worlds, they’re far more interesting than any of the real-world ones that never succeeded,

Maybe the ambitiously bold policy deadlines mentioned above aren’t really fixed, they're only innuendoes. It’s an unfortunate mystery that no one apparently really knows how these diverse, consequential goals will be threaded through our blue state’s arduous permitting, site licensing and fiscal regulatory processes to meet these aspirational deadlines. Here's hoping.